I Was Working in the Lab Late One Night When My Eyes Beheld an Eerie Sight

10/31/2014

Kristie Nybo, PhD

From Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll to "Doc" Emmett Brown, the image of the mad scientist abounds in popular culture. But where did this come from, and are such depictions justified? On this Halloween, BioTechniques takes a look at some real studies that just might be creepy enough to inspire such caricatures. Read more...

Doris Taylor harvests organs from the deceased, hooks them to tubing, and
flushes them with detergents to remove their cells, all with the plan
of later reanimating the lifeless carcass that remains. As director
of Regenerative Medicine Research at Texas Heart Institute, Taylor
uses these decellularized organs as scaffolds for seeding stem cells
in her research, all with the goal of one day creating on-demand
organs for transplant.

A source of fearful fascination and spooky speculation since their discovery,
mummies can now be examined in even greater detail. Carsten Pusch at
the University of Tübingen in Germany focuses on next generation
sequencing of the genomes and metagenomes of ancient Egyptian mummies,
generating data about plants used for embalming, microbial
contaminants and infecting organisms in the ancient populations, along
with genetic information about the mummies themselves.

Of the creepy crawly creatures of the night, cockroaches seem to rule them
all. With their scuttling and swarming behaviors and their ability to
disappear at the sight of light, they are hard to manage once an
infestation has been established. But neuroscientists Greg Gage and
Tim Marzullo, co-founders of the educational company Backyard Brains,
now offer a sort of revenge on these odious pests. With the purchase
of a kit, amateur scientists learn to perform surgery on the bugs to
implant a chip that allows them to control the roach’s behavior with
their iphones through electrodes that feed into the antennae. Let’s
just hope these budding scientists maintain better control of their
creations than Dr. Frankenstein did of his monster!

Walking Corpse syndrome is a neurological disorder where patients believe they
are dead, decaying, or missing blood or internal organs. Adam Zeman
(University of Exeter), Steven Laureys (University of Liege), and
their colleagues cast new light on the disorder this year when they
used positron emission tomography to look at metabolism in the brain
of a patient afflicted with this condition. They found that
metabolic activity across large portions of the brain resembled
someone in a vegetative state. Is this proof that zombies really do
walk the earth?

Long considered a symbol of the occult, the sinister nature of the goat
escalated when it began producing spider silk. Randy Lewis at Utah
State University studies spider silk for its potential in applications
such as artificial ligaments and tendons, bulletproof vests, or car
airbags. The problem in this line of work was quantity. Spiders are
territorial, so there are only so many that can be kept near one
another and only so much silk each can produce. The answer? Clone the
gene for spider silk and express it in goats so it can be purified
from the milk.

During a transgenesis experiment involving an unrelated gene, members of
Hiroshi Sasaki’s lab, then at Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan,
made the gruesome discovery of a mouse embryo missing its head. The
sighting of this “headshrinker” phenotype eventually led to
identification of the DNA binding protein Ssdp1 responsible and
discovery of its role in head development.

So is the "mad scientist" stereotype warranted? And are you
walking and working among them?